Simple question, do you like your job?

Quoted: Simple question, do you like your job?

Ask me in about 7 months.

All of our Engineers seem to love it. After almost a year here they still fight over the "good" missions.

I have been a 1371 Combat Engineer for 11 years the best  job I ever had....
Pull smoke and run

Engineer Corps is the best branch in the Army.  Engineers are needed throughout the battlefield and are expected to fight the enemy as Sappers or as infantry, or building roads and structures for our military or the host nation trying to win hearts and minds.  Often, a Sapper unit does all these things in a deployment.

In Iraq, our combat engineer company was DS under 3rd Unit-of-Action/3rd Infantry Division/TF Liberty (later TF Band of Brothers).  When the Army transformed Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) into Unit-of-Actions (UAs), they got rid of each maneuver brigade's engineer battalion and turned it into a Brigade Troops Battalion (BTB) comprised of chemical, MPs, military intel, and other support personnel.  

Thereafter, UAs had by de facto, zero organic engineer capabilities whatsoever... big mistake !! Especially in the "nation building" type mission of OIF.  The maneuver battalions in the UA did each have a combat engineer "Echo" company, but all they had were ACEs and SEEs, and their parent maneuver battalion was primarily using them as Infantry.  You can do that since engineer doctrine says combat engineer units exist as a reserve infantry force, but Sappers are combat multipliers and by using them only as infantry, you're wasting alot of good talent.  

Hence, when 3UA/3rd ID arrived and saw our motor pool filled with Buffalos, Meerkat, Huskeys, RG-31s, D9 and D7 bulldozers, graders, scoop loaders, water distributer, dump trucks, and a 22-Ton crane, they thought they'd hit the jackpot and dreamed up all kinds of projects for us to do, aside from our main purpose in Iraq of hunting IEDs and searching for the bad guys who plant them.

Everyone was outside the wire.  Our line platoons were hunting IEDs day or night, rain or shine, as well as searching cars and houses along our routes, and our construction platoon was living on other FOBs weeks at a time building, repairing, and demolishing things for the US Army or the Iraqis.

In patrolling, one of our biggest enemies, besides insurgents, was the monotony of driving up and down the same routes two or three times a day and complacency brought by falling into a routine.  It takes discipline in keeping with a sleep plan.  It takes discipline in meeting your SP times (highly important!)  It takes discipline to keep your vehicles maintained, doing PMCS especially at oh-dark-thirty in the morning or late at night.  It takes discipline to making sure all your radios have the right fill and work before a patrol.  It takes discipline to maintain a load-plan on your vehicles so everyone knows where everything is.  It takes discipline to clean your weapons after every patrol even if all you want to do when you get back is sleep

For maintenance, It takes discipline and leadership to keep a good PLL, stay ahead of the A-service schedule (our mechanics were awesome), keeping a high O-R rate. Same issues in discipline applied to our construction missions as well.  Discipline is the foundation of a professional soldier and making sure shit is done right in a combat environment.  A few dirt bags received Article 15s, but everyone else had their stuff together.  I think one of the main reasons why we had very low casualties and high success in finding IEDs while being involved in a multitude of construction projects, was discipline and good leaders.  

Morale was high because we knew we were making a significant difference saving soldiers lives and a tangible difference due to our construction projects.  We can drive around town and say with pride we did that... and that ...and that.  Of course, being in the newspapers all the time helped out a lot.  Another company in our battalion had high casualties and low morale, which I suspect comes down to discipline.  I was talking to their company commander one time, and he related how they were having a rough time and sounded like a defeated soldier.  They had a low O-R rate in maintenance, and we also learned that their soldiers would go on patrol wearing only T-shirts under their IBAS.

In all, being a combat engineer is hectic and extremely dangerous, but in the end it is very rewarding.



Video our 3rd Platoon Made =  media.putfile.com/Trailblazer---467th-Engineer-BN-Alpha-3-Iraq


Video I posted earlier in another thread which I can no longer find = media.putfile.com/OIF-III-Trailblazer-467th-Engineers